Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction

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2003 4: 147EthnographyJean Comaroff and John Comaroff

Violence of AbstractionEthnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the

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Ethnography on an awkward scalePostcolonial anthropology and the violence ofabstraction

■ Jean Comaroff and John ComaroffUniversity of Chicago/American Bar Foundation

A B S T R A C T ■ In what ways has the movement of anthropology offthe reservation, and off the island, challenged the ethnographic practicethat has historically been its raison d’être? How has the increasinghistoricization of the discipline, and its encounters with the variegatedeffects of globalization, altered its methodological orientations andstrategies? How should those orientations and strategies change inproportion to transformations in the social and cultural geographies of theworlds inhabited by our ‘natives’? Is it possible to ‘do’ ethnography on anawkward scale in multiple dimensions? What are the epistemic implicationsof these questions for the anthropology of the future? Taking as its pointof departure current debates over (i) the relationship between evidenceand explanation in the social sciences, and (ii) the relative demands of thelocal and the global in focusing the ethnographic gaze, this article exploresthe premises and promises of contemporary ethnography. It invokes recentresearch on the rise of an ‘occult economy’ in the South African postcolonyto argue for a radical expansion of the horizons of ethnographicmethodology, for a method simultaneously inductive and deductive,empirical and imaginative.

K E Y W O R D S ■ ethnography, theory, history, local/global, occulteconomy, postcoloniality, modernity, South Africa

graphyCopyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)www.sagepublications.com Vol 4(2): 147–179[1466–1381(200306)4:2;147–179;035961]

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. . . talking to the natives is evidently a dangerous experiment.(Lee, 1998 [1890]: 407)

More than 30 years ago we met a madman in Mafeking, now the hyphen-ated capital of the North West Province in the ‘new’ South Africa.1 Or, tobe more precise, we met a prophet in polythene robes who had been incar-cerated in a mental asylum by the apartheid state. We spoke of him in ascholarly essay (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1987): outside of his extrava-gantly colored costume, what had marked his presence on the local scenebefore his ‘admission’ to hospital was a fondness for standing, hour afterhour, as a silent witness near the local railway depot. It was from here thatgenerations of black men were transported nightly to the cities ofMakgoweng, the Place of Whites, to toil in its mines and factories. It wasfrom here, too, that the capillaries of racial capitalism, South Africa-style,became visible to anybody who cared to gaze upon the twilight movementof migrating males across a cloven landscape. Anybody troubled enough.Or mad enough.

Three decades on, after the demise of the ancien régime, we passed thevery spot, in Station Road, where the mute madman used to linger. He haddied, anonymously, some years before. It was early afternoon on a Saturday,a sparkling winter day in July. As we crossed the street on our way to thelocal police station we noticed a small knot of men-in-blue nearby. Theyhad surrounded a decidedly strange figure: an adult male, nude except fora pair of threadbare boxers, covered in white paste. Emaciated, his eyesshowed no animation whatsoever. With a measure of gentleness not usuallyassociated with the law here, he was taken to the Mafikeng CommunityService Center – police stations are now ‘community service centers,’ just asthe old South African Police Force has become the South African PoliceServices – where he was fed and allowed to wander around unhindered.Which he did, every now and again climbing on a chair or a desk, everynow and again curling up in fetal repose. All the while, like the madman ofearlier vintage, he uttered not a word. We asked the officers on desk dutywho, or what, the figure was.

‘A zombie,’ we were told.‘What is to become of him?’ we asked.‘We hope that his people, maybe a maternal uncle (malome), will come

for him,’ said one officer.‘How did he come to be wandering in Station Road?’‘Who knows? Perhaps his owner lost him or let him go by mistake.’As we have noted (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999c; cf Ralushai et al.,

1996: 5), there are a fair number of living-dead about these days. Termeddithotsela or dipoko (sing. sepoko; from the Afrikaans spook, ‘ghost’), theyare thought to be the creatures of witches who, by nefarious means, have

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sucked away their human essence and turned them into brute labor power;this to make them toil away at night in the fields. Indeed, the (then) actingVice Chancellor of the local University of the North West, himself a scholarof the white Afrikaans occult, casually promised to introduce us to oneabout whom he had long known.

He did not have to. We encountered many more in the course of our ownresearch.2 Some of them appeared in circumstances much less benign, muchmore violent and troubled, than those that brought the frail phantom to theattention of the Mafikeng police. One such circumstance ended in themurder of a well-known personage in the province, ‘Ten-Ten’ MotlhabaneMakolomakwa. Sometime middle-level state employee, owner of a localfootball team, successful farmer, and the chairman of the tribal council ofMatlonyane village, he was set alight by five youths who insisted that hehad killed their fathers and turned them into spectral field hands.3 Another,in 1995, involved striking workers at a coffee plantation in nearbyMpumalanga Province: they refused to work for three supervisors whomthey accused of killing employees and turning them into zombies for theirprivate enrichment.4 A third case – immortalized in a play, Ipizombi, well-known in local cultural circles and beyond – was sparked by a taxi accidentin Kokstad in which 12 schoolboys were killed. Much discussed all overSouth Africa at the time, it involved the murder of two elderly ‘witches’ whowere said to have stolen the corpses and conjured them into living-dead.5

Cases like this are often reported in matter-of-fact terms by the nationalmedia (cf. Fordred, 1998) and – along with Hollywood horror movies,local telenovelas of witch killings, and other iterations of spectral death-and-dread – are widely consumed. Significantly, they are sometimesinvoked, either before the fact or in the act, by those who perpetrate occult-related violence in the South African countryside. On occasion they havealso become the stuff of cybertalk, not least among southern Africansabroad, whose anxious Internet exchanges, intermittently filtered throughEuro-American urban legends, have flowed back onto local soil, there to befabricated into new kinds of fact. Thus it is that reality and its represen-tations become confounded in one another, at once both cause and effect,each inseparably a part of the phenomenology of everyday life in the post-colony. Thus do imported and domestic spirits infuse each other; all beingsigns of both the local and the translocal, here and elsewhere, now and then,the concrete and the virtual. Thus it is that the national population of living-dead is thought, in some parts of South Africa, to have been joined by trans-national zombies, entering the country from Mozambique and other places(see note 2), just as they did in earlier times (Harries, 1994). Thus it is, too,that home-grown phantoms bear more than passing, if culturally inflected,resemblance to images originating in Haitian Voodoo, to the celluloid freaksthat haunt such films as Night of the Living Dead (dir. George Romero,

Comaroff and Comaroff ■ Ethnography on an awkward scale 149




1968) or The Serpent and the Rainbow (dir. Wes Craven, 1988), and toghouls that rise to the rhythms of various popular musics.

These specters, in turn, evoke others: most obviously, a trade in humanbeings and body parts at once local and transnational, real and imagined,legitimate and illicit, more or less coerced. It is a trade, as we all now know,that stretches from the import and export of sex-workers, domestic workers,and mail order brides (these often being hard to tell apart); through the saleand adoption of babies (also difficult to distinguish, the latter often beingan ethicized, affectively acceptable euphemism for the former); to transac-tions in blood, genes, eyes, hearts, kidneys, and the like, transactions inwhich the medical may run into the magical (Ehrenreich and Hochschild,2003; Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant, 2002). Some of this trade, when itentails fully sentient persons, evokes the horrors of slavery; where less thanwhole persons are involved, it extends the logic of commodity exchange toever more divisible components of homo sapiens. Almost everywhere it isregarded, by those whose populations are being harvested, as a new formof Empire erected under the increasingly contested sign of global free tradeand its highly inequitable flows of wealth; a curious footnote, this, to Hardtand Negri (2000).6 Elsewhere, we argue that these phenomena are all inter-related features of an ‘occult economy,’ itself spawned by a brand of neolib-eral capitalism that attributes to the free market an ineluctably salvific,redemptive, even messianic quality. By ‘occult economy’ (Comaroff andComaroff, 1999a) we intend a set of practices involving the (again, real orimagined) resort to magical means for material ends; or, more expansively,the conjuring of wealth by inherently mysterious techniques. Of course,what counts as ‘magic’ varies, although it is always set apart from habitual,more transparent forms of production. This arcane economy has other, well-known manifestations: among them, an alleged rise in many parts of theworld of witchcraft and satanism (Comaroff, 1997; Geschiere, 1977; LaFontaine, 1997), of ‘fee for service’ faiths (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2002;Weller, 2000; cf Kramer, 1999), of enchanted financial practices that, likepyramid schemes and lotteries, promise fabulous wealth without work.

All this enchantment, tellingly, is making itself felt at just the momentwhen the global triumph of modernity was supposed to put an end, onceand for all, to such putatively premodern things. The iron cage, so fearedby Max Weber, turns out to have been a cage of ironies. To be sure, if everthere was a figure that typified the magical production of wealth withoutwork, of the occult grounding of neoliberal capitalism tout court, it is thezombie: all surplus value, no costly, irrational, troublesome human needs.This kaleidoscopic figure, the ultimate embodiment of flexible, ‘non-standard,’ asocial labor, comes to us in a range of ethnographic, historical,and literary accounts that point both to subtle differences and to noncoin-cidental similarities. Zombies appear, simultaneously, as antemodern and

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postmodern, simultaneously supralocal, translocal, and local, simul-taneously planetary and, refracted through the shards of vernacular culturalpractices, profoundly parochial. Which is why the living-dead now regu-larly cross international borders; why, say, a South African doctor of Indianorigins could claim to have been turned into a ghostly automaton by aNigerian satanist.7 And why zombification, the stuff of much urban legendacross the world right now, has become an allegorical touchstone fordescribing the ostensible alienation, loss of individuality, and corporatemastery of an epoch, as yet in its infancy, already being described as Post-Human (Halberstam and Livingston, 1995; Fukuyama, 2002). As it did,albeit in somewhat different guise, with the rise of Fordism and the modeof human abstraction (dis)embodied in its production lines8 – and, beforethat, on the plantations and in the mines of far-flung colonies.

Our concerns here, we stress, are not theoretical or conceptual.9 We cameacross zombies, recall, through an empirical conjuncture: it was by force ofhistorical fact, rather than by way of abstract analytical interest, that wefound ourselves compelled to make sense of them in situ. Consequently,what detains us here is much more immediate, much more modest, muchmore, well, methodological. By what ethnographic means does one capturethe commodification of human beings in part or in whole, the occulteconomy of which it is part, the material and moral conditions that animatesuch an economy, the new religious and social movements it spawns, themodes of producing wealth which it privileges, and so on? Inherentlyawkward of scale, none of these phenomena are easily captured by theethnographer’s lens. Should each of them nonetheless be interrogated purelyin their own particularity, their own locality? Or should we try to recognizewhere, in the particularity of the local, lurk social forces of larger scale,forces whose sociology demands attention if we are to make sense of theworlds we study without parochializing and, worse yet, exoticizing them.Geertz (1973), for whom ethnography defined the generic practice ofanthropology, once remarked famously that we do not study villages, thatwe study in villages. The point was well-taken. But how – given that theobjects of our gaze commonly elude, embrace, attenuate, transcend, trans-form, consume, and construct the local – do we arrive at a praxis for an agethat seems . . . post-anthropological? Of an age in which we are called uponnot to study in places at all, indeed not to trust ‘anthropological locations’(Gupta and Ferguson, 1997), but rather to study the production of place(Appadurai, 1996)? If we are not sure where or what ‘the field’ is, or howto circumscribe the things in which we interest ourselves, wherein lie theways and means by which we are to make the knowledges with which wevex ourselves?

Of course, the question of Method, in the upper case, is not new. It hasbeen with us throughout the life of the discipline, if in different forms and





formulations. Nor, right now, are we alone in this. Postcolonial historians,for example, seem to be anguishing a lot these days about the death ofhistory. Not The End of History as proclaimed a decade ago, somewhatinfamously, by Francis Fukuyama (1992), but an altogether new kind ofdeath: death by diffusion into memory, biography, testimony, heritagetourism, and other expressions of history-as-lived rather than history-as-learned (Minkley et al., n.d.; cf. Comaroff, forthcoming). In times pastwe anthropologists plagued ourselves over the epistemic, ethical, andpolitical dimensions of what we do: over whether ours was not an endem-ically colonizing enterprise – a preemptive seizure of authority, of voice, ofthe right to represent and, incidentally, to profit – or, worse yet, an activityfounded, voyeuristically, on the violation of ‘the’ other. Now, like thosepostcolonial historians, we worry whether our subject matter is ours at allor whether it has forever dispersed itself beyond our privileged dominion.Once we were told that we would be out of business just as soon as ournatives were no longer authentically native (a.k.a. primitive, colonized).Today we are undermined by the fact that those very ‘natives’ have seizedthe terms of our trade, terms in which we once described them, terms thatseem not to work very well any more as analytic constructs, terms that, nowessentialized and commodified by ‘others’ one and all, return to haunt us.Add to this two other considerations, themselves intimately connected: first,the aforementioned fact that almost everything which falls within the discur-sive purview of contemporary anthropology exists, in the phenomenalworld, on a scale that does not yield easily to received anthropologicaltheories or methods; and second, that our ‘subjects’ no longer inhabit socialcontexts for which we have a persuasive lexicon, not least because abstractnouns like society, community, culture, and class have all been called intoquestion in this ever more neoliberal age (cf. Stoller, 1997: 82), this age ofthe scare quote-around-everything, this age of ironic, iconic detachment.What, in the upshot, are we left with? A very stark question: Has ethnog-raphy become an impossibility? Have we finally reached its end?

Ethnography and its global distractions

. . . what actually happened, the facts of the case, who said what . . . all thatis incidental. The real truth is behind all that. The real truth may beswimming in a completely different direction . . . And that’s what you haveto get to . . . Forget the appearances.

(The Great Ourdoors, dir. Neil McCarthy)10

Not surprisingly, in light of this Big Question, there has been a fair bitof debate, over the past few years, about the fate of ethnography in the age

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of globalization. We have addressed the matter ourselves, most pointedly inour Max Gluckman Memorial Lecture of 1998 (Comaroff and Comaroff,1999a). Its title, ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction,’ soughtto invoke the stark dislocations wrought on the everyday lives of ordinarycitizens in the northerly provinces of South Africa by material forces of evermore planetary scale, dislocations about which many of them spoke withboth anxiety and passion. We also meant to underscore the challengeinvolved in grasping, ethnographically, the processes by which those world-historical forces were being made meaningful and tractable by the humanbeings in question: how they labored to condense and personalize valuesand relations in conditions which they presumed to be labile, difficult tounderstand, inherently mysterious in their effects. Among our objectives, insum, was an effort to reflect on the interplay of theory and method in thetreatment of an anthropological location of changing proportions. Althoughof pressing concern at the moment, this is a problem as old as the disciplineitself. Our essay, after all, was written to commemorate a scholar who triedlong ago to subject the broad sweep of the colonial encounter to the ethno-graphic gaze.

In the post-Marxist age, the strongest suit of anthropology, in the eyesof most of its practitioners, remains its ‘ability to get inside and understandsmall-scale communities, to comprehend local loyalties and systems ofknowledge’ (Graeber, 2002: 1222). Our disciplinary concerns may alter, ourgenres may blur, our theories may come and go, but ethnography remains‘the anthropologist’s muse’ (Lewis, 1973), the source of solace to which weturn in the face of epistemic or political doubt. An extended spell of ‘partici-pant-observation’ is still the irreducible minimum of professional creden-tials required in the discipline, Sherry Ortner (1997: 61) notes. This in spiteof the ambiguity that attaches to each of the two terms, not to mention theoxymoron built into their hyphenation. This in spite, also, of the fact – illus-trated by Ortner’s own account of studying the ‘postcommunity’ – thatcontemporary anthropological practice deviates, as it probably always hasdone, from the foundational fiction of fieldwork: the conceit, now long crit-icized (cf. Gupta and Ferguson, 1997), that it is possible to access ‘thetotality of relations’ of a ‘society,’ or the essential workings of ‘a culture,’in any one place.11

And yet the axiom that lies behind this fiction, that any knowledgederived at first-hand by proximity to natives has an a priori privilege,continues to shape the analytical vision of the discipline. ‘Ethnography,’ saysGeorge Marcus (1994: 44), ‘functions well and creatively without a sensethat it needs a positive theoretical paradigm – that is, conventional socialtheory – to guide it. Instead, it breeds off the critique of its own rhetoric.’As a result, anthropology has, for the most part, remained unrelentinglypositivist in spirit. Much of its shared wisdom consists in generalizations





about the particular that are also particularizations of the general; empiri-cal aggregates, in short, not abstract propositions or explanatory schemata.The role of this species of knowledge, like its politics (Graeber, 2002), hasbeen to show that, even in the act of accommodating to ineluctable macro-cosmic forces, different peoples do things differently, be it because of theirdistinctive cultures, their social situations, or their will to resist (cf. Marcus,1994). The epistemic consequences that follow are plain enough: a commit-ted realism, and a form of relativism that sits uneasily with ‘general’ theorygrounded in history, philosophy, political economy, or whatever. True, therehave always been counter tendencies: those who have espoused evol-utionary, Marxist, sociobiological, or psychoanalytic approaches, forinstance, have been more partial to higher-order abstraction, generalization,explanation. But this minority has tended to be the exception that provesthe rule.

The epistemic foundations of anthropological empiricism receivedsomewhat less scrutiny than they might have done during the ‘reflexivemoment’ of the 1980s. But in practice, ethnography was already under-going a metamorphosis. The discipline was coming face to face with theconsequences of what had begun to make itself felt in the 1960s: that‘local’ systems – or, to be more precise, the signs and practices observablewithin any given social world, however it was constituted – could nolonger be studied, or accounted for, with reference to conventional geo-graphies; that the fiction of sovereign cultures, however deftly describedor ethnographically authenticated, could no longer be sustained; thatestablished modes of representation were no longer sufficient unto thepolitical and ethical demands of ‘writing culture’ (Clifford and Marcus,1986). Yet, in the absence of ‘an explicit paradigm for experimentation’(Marcus, 1994: 46), the methodological revolution one might haveexpected to flow from these shifts of perspective – themselves sharpenedwith every passing year by the complex, uneven effects of processes ofplanetary integration – has not been forthcoming. Per contra, notwith-standing some creative efforts to author new kinds of anthropology, thereaction in many quarters, in Europe as well as in North America, has beenconservative. There has been a tendency to batten down the hatches infervid defense of the particular, the local, and the parochial against theonslaught of ‘the global’ (e.g. Englund, 1996; Rutherford, 1999; Sahlins,1999; Kapferer, 2000, 2001), the latter, in anthropology-talk, havingbecome a generalized, under-motivated sign of the changing universe inwhich we live and work.

Why? One consequence of globalization for the human sciences, arguesAppadurai (1997: 115), has been to instill an anxiety that the ‘space ofintimacy in social life’ will be lost; the very space of intimacy that has alwaysbeen the ethnographer’s stock-in-trade. Whether or not this is a sufficient

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explanation for the anthropological angst of the present moment, itcertainly is the case that our latest ‘crisis of representation’ has been trans-posed into a methodological key – as if the survival of the disciplinedepended entirely on preserving its established modes of producing know-ledge. Note how, in some quarters, ethnography is being depicted as anendangered species. Englund and Leach (2000: 238), for instance, appearto believe that ‘it’ is engaged in a mortal struggle with ‘generalizing perspec-tives’ whose powerful, if unnamed, proponents have allegedly decreed that‘localized fieldwork has had its day.’ For Englund and Leach, the enemy isthe ‘meta-narrative of modernity,’ a somewhat ill-defined construct which,despite their protestations to the contrary, seems suspiciously like asynonym for ‘Theory’ in the upper case.12 And for an ensemble of ‘familiarsociological abstractions,’ among them commodification, space-timecompression, individualization, disenchantment. This ‘metropolitan’ meta-narrative, they argue, ‘undermine(s) . . . what is unique in the ethnographicmethod – its reflexivity, which gives subjects authority in determining thecontext of their beliefs and practices’ (Englund and Leach, 2000: 225). Theapprehensiveness about the future of fieldwork palpable here seems to stem,above all, from a crisis of identity, from sacred boundaries breached, and,concomitantly, from the desire to preserve a unique scholarly patrimonyfrom the encroachment of an ever more generic social science. It cannothave gone unnoticed, in this regard, that other disciplines have lately laidclaim to ethnographic methods. Thus Englund and Leach (2000: 238) insistthat ‘[t]he uniqueness of the ethnographic method is at stake in the currentfascination with multiple modernities . . . Sociocultural anthropologymerges into cultural studies and cultural sociology, and ethnographicanalyses become illustrations consumed by metropolitan theorists.’ Howunlike an earlier, brilliantly iconoclastic Leach (1961), who encouragedanthropologists to move, by ‘inspired guesswork,’ beyond hideboundempiricism.

There are serious political issues at stake in arguments like this. In theeffort to privilege ‘the local,’ however worthy it may be, we risk slightingor misrecognizing the global forces that – increasingly, if with varyingdegrees of visibility – are besetting ‘little guys’ (Graeber, 2002: 1223) allover the map. Many of those among whom we work, apparently unlikeEnglund and Leach’s ‘natives,’13 are very anxious about the effect of thoseforces, which, they tell us, are putting their social and material survival atrisk. In the faux egalitarianism of these neoliberal times, it is easy to becomemired in trivial arguments over whether ‘meta-narratives of modernity,’ or‘Theory,’ removes from ‘others’ the capacity to represent themselves or todetermine their own futures. All this while the masters of the market, andpowerful political pragmatists, fashion new modes of extraction, abstrac-tion, and explanation. We would do well to ponder, in this respect, why it





is that so many ‘native’ intellectuals have been distrustful of even the mostsensitive, ostensibly other-centered knowledge produced by our discipline,why they believe that this knowledge is intrinsically inimical to their ownauthority and interests (cf. Asad, 1973; Banaji, 1970; Magubane, 1971).Mafeje (1998: 67; cf. Sharp, 1998), for one, holds that ethnography, to betrue to itself, needs to be liberated entirely from anthropology, thus tobecome – without even the most reflexive of ethnographers – a source ‘ofsocial texts authored [solely] by the people themselves’. The logical endpoint of reducing our practice to the elicitation of narratives of local experi-ence is not a unique anthropology at all. Nor is it a politics of positiveengagement. Quite the opposite. In a postcolonial age in which ‘natives’everywhere speak for themselves, it is, simply, redundancy. The alternative,patently, is to argue for a theoretically and politically principled socialscience.

For our own part, we continue to have confidence in ethnography andthe forms of insight – both reflective and reflexive, both imaginative andempirical – to which it gives access. There is a proviso, however: that,instead of fetishizing method, instead of romancing the idea that it mightitself yield up naked truths, we face up to the epistemic challenge of whatit takes to ‘commit social science’ in the postcolonial world: in a world inwhich ‘globalization’ is an increasingly contested, troubling reality, in which‘modernity’ is an increasingly contested, troubling ideological formation(Knauft, 1997). Those anthropologists who have chosen to take on thischallenge have tended not to decry ‘localized’ ethnography, but to insist onits unique value in plumbing the nature and effects of large-scale social,economic, and political processes (e.g. Appadurai, 1996, 1997; Geschiere,1997; Meyer, 1999; Weiss, 1996). Their work points to the fact that ourmodes of producing knowledge demand critical review – even ‘redesign’(Marcus, 1994: 46) – in the face of history; especially the history of a timesuch as this, when popular discourses across the planet posit that the worldis undergoing changes of major proportions. This perception, after all, doesnot exist only in the imagination of anthropologists afflicted with ‘the meta-narrative of modernity’. What is more, we need to concede that our craft isnot, and never has been, analytically self-sufficient. Part of a shiftingdivision of labor within the human sciences, it is engaged in dialogue withother ways of making sense of the present in both its macro- and micro-cosmic dimensions (Sharp, 1998; Stoller, 1997). This is all to the good, sinceit is only by broadening our frames of reference that we may address someof the awkward questions that have come to confront us about our method-ology: can we be sure, for example, that ‘the particular’ we seek to study,or the cultural worlds we presume to exist, may actually be empiricallybounded? Is ‘the local’ not the constantly refashioned product of forces wellbeyond itself (Appadurai, 1996; also 1997)? Does it not exist only as part

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of a sociopolitical geography of multiple scales and coordinates (Ortner,1997)? Is it not true that the singularity of places, just like the singularityof ‘traditions,’ ‘customs,’ and ‘cultures,’ is being fashioned ever more inresponse to the market? Surely, neat antinomies between the local and theglobal, between field and context, between ethnography and metanarrative,beg the very questions that we should be asking.

These questions have also been at the core of a friendly exchange we havehad with Sally Falk Moore (1999) over the susceptibility of large-scaleanalytic claims to ethnographic proof. Her critique of our Gluckman lecturehinges on a methodological point: the unverifiability of its central thesis,namely, that the rapid expansion of an occult economy in postcolonialSouth Africa has been a by-product of the material and experiential impacton rural populations of the cumulative effects of a globalizing capitalism –specifically, of the processes of abstraction and alienation built into it. The‘imaginative sociology’ by means of which we arrive at this thesis may beilluminating, concedes Moore. But it does not offer sufficient evidence eitherto substantiate or to falsify a claim of cause-and-effect. Moreover, by ascrib-ing the growth of a local occult economy to world-historical forces, we ‘turngeneral context into particular explanation’ (1999: 306). We also confusethe general and the particular. How so? At times, she suggests, we deny thatresort to the magical, and to its associated forms of violence, is unique toSouth Africa; at other times we imply that there is something special aboutits deployment here.

Allow us to recall what the disagreement is about. Our objectives in theGluckman lecture were twofold. One was to make sense of some highlyvisible, much discussed, old-yet-new practices in postcolonial South Africa.Taken together, these practices, themselves rooted in variously defined‘localities,’ appeared to constitute a discernible phenomenon: an occulteconomy. As we have implied, this term describes an empirically-groundedabstraction, an abstraction derived from, but not reducible to, the narratedexperience and social activities of a large number of diversely positionedhuman beings. In short, it is an analytic concept based in the concrete.Located between the global and the local, subsuming them in a four-dimensional geography,14 that concept is mobilized to arrive at ‘thick,’moving portraits of people’s lives and labors; also to elucidate the moti-vation, the meaning, and the consequences of their actions. It is a tool thatenables the dialectic of deduction and induction on which, in our view, allprincipled social science ought to be founded.

The other objective of our analysis of ‘occult economies’ was to explainwhy that enchanted economy should manifest itself so palpably now, whenconventional wisdom would have us expect otherwise; why it calls forthreceived cultural practices, yet transmutes them into virulently alteredforms; why, while clearly a domestic product, it bears close resemblance to





similar economies in other places, most of all in post-totalitarian contexts,where neoliberal reform has suddenly and simultaneously liberated anddisempowered, enriched and impoverished. These parallels are striking andyet hard to pin down. They bear witness to the play of large forces: (i) that,although volatile and only partly visible, are not random; (ii) whose exist-ence may be inferred only through their effects; (iii) whose workings varyacross the axes of the planetary map, making them impossible to grasp atonly one site; and (iv) which, because they have not yet fully run theircourse, elude proof by ordinary means. The problem that we set ourselves,then, was to account for the workings of a metamorphosing capitalism thatis both global in its reach and localized in its protean manifestations. Builtinto that problem is an effort to engage at once with the general and theparticular, with variance and similarity, with continuity and rupture. Farfrom being a confusion yielded by our method, it is a necessary requirementthereof. Respectful of the empirical without being empiricist, we sought toopen up new angles on a world-historical process of awkward, shiftingscale.

At issue here, then, are alternative ideologies-of-method, alternative epis-temes. The differences that flow from them, not least over what it takes toprove an argument or to verify a theory, are substantial. Which is why westand accused, in this exchange, of not having provided enough evidentiarysupport for claims about some very general transformations in SouthAfrican economy and society; even more, about their location in the broadsweep of the history of capital. Even if we agree that we ought to render as‘provable propositions’ our analysis of these transformations – or of theways in which they are locally inhabited, experienced, narrated, acted upon– we find it hard to see how to do so without resorting to reduction adabsurdum. But we do not believe that this is what we should be doing;indeed, we resist the positivist reflex that would encourage us to do so. Afterall, if they were held to the demands of empiricist validation, or subjectedto the blinding lights of western science, some of the most enduring insightsof modernist social thought would not pass muster. We have in mind, interalia, Marx’s analysis of the commodity, Weber’s elective affinity betweenProtestantism and the rise of capitalism, and Durkheim’s theory of theelementary forms of religious life.

Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, of course, all argued against bothungrounded historical conjecture and theory deduced purely from philo-sophical first principles; although each of them indulged in these things onoccasion. More to the point here, each sought to take the measure of thedifficult relation between the experience of social phenomena and the forcesand facts, the rhymes and reasons, that lay behind it. Each exercised a fertilesociological imagination, seeking, in the Great Outdoors of their changingworlds, to ‘forget the appearances,’ the better to discern the ‘real truths’

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swimming behind them (McCarthy, cited above). Each knew that socialaction, like the fabrication of social meaning, is not pursued by humanbeings just as they please; that its determinations have to be explained; thatthe job of the social scientist is to construe the processes by which realitiesare realized, objects objectified, classes of persons and things classified, andso forth. All of which returns us to the dialectics of deduction and induc-tion – to the co-production of fact and sociological imagining – implicatedin ‘doing ethnography.’

It also returns us to a very basic question: precisely what kinds ofmethodological operations are entailed in ‘doing ethnography’ as weenvision it? That question is not, we suggest, best answered in the abstract.Just as method is always profoundly theoretical in its provenance, so itssubstance ought always to be practice-based and context-sensitive.

Confronting the great outdoors

Our time: 1989, near the end of apartheid.Our place: the North West Province of South Africa where, long ago, wedid doctoral research.We returned to the Mafikeng District after an enforced absence of some 20years; our research, in the interim, had crossed over into Botswana and intothe colonial past. Driving in from across the veld, we crested the foothill tothe south of the Tshidi-Rolong capital to behold a strikingly discordant land-scape. The contours of the old Tswana town – weathered red-clay walls, desic-cated thatch roofs, giant boulders, cattle-trodden trails, spry camelthorns –had been dwarfed by a skyline of altogether different scale. The precocious,postmodern outlines of a new city, its architecture a bold pastiche of variousinternational styles of the 1970s and 1980s, proclaimed an assertive, upstartgovernmentality. History and Hubris, both capitalized, had consummated abrazen, quick and dirty affaire on this arid terrain: on it, one of apartheid’smost elaborate ethnic ‘homelands’ (bantus tans) had been put in place. Theillegitimate insta-polity of Bophuthatswana, and the simulacra of its bastardsovereignty, had been erected on land long owned and inhabited by the Tshidi,subjecting them and scores of other Tswana chiefdoms across the northwestto the violent authority of a puppet-state empowered by the material, military,and ideological might of the apartheid regime.

What met our astonished gaze, in sum, was the enactment, in concrete,of that regime’s version of indirect rule: the tight, closely-policed integrationof local polities, under their ‘traditional’ rulers, into an ostensibly indepen-dent ethno-nation. Herein lay the completion of the process, endemic tocolonialism, by which those polities – now designated ‘tribal authorities’ –were relegated to the peripheries of a nation-state predicated on difference.





The running together of humble adobe and soaring plate glass made visibleanother juxtaposition: the affirmation, on one hand, of a sense of Tshidicultural particularity, and, on the other, its encompassment within a wider,multi-ethnic state that was itself a maelstrom of powerful economic, social,and moral currents. It hardly seemed accidental that the independent-minded Tshidi chief, Kebalepile, had died in Mafikeng in the early 1970s,allegedly as a result of witchcraft at the hands of the recently-installed presi-dent of Bophuthatswana, Lucas Mangope.15 Mangope, a subaltern sover-eign if there ever was one, was seen by the citizenry of Mafikeng as the newcolonizing cuckoo in their nest. By blaming him for the occult killing oftheir traditional leader, Tshidi sought to name the spirit of a spiritless age,the Zeitgeist of late-colonial history.

This magical murder, refracted through the local moral imaginary, mighthave opened a new chapter in the unfolding confrontation between the lateTshidi world and the wider universe that embraced it. But the history ofwhich it was part went back a long way. As we have noted before (e.g.Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, 1997), setswana, the more-or-less open,more-or-less labile ensemble of signs and practices taken locally to consti-tute vernacular ‘culture’ – the term is used as freely by black South Africansthese days as it is by others – was itself the offspring of a protracted colonialencounter. Mafikeng bore all the scars of that encounter, of earlier struggles,of earlier conjunctures. In the mid-1800s, for example, it was at the nub ofa frontier along which white settlers and African chiefdoms fought overland, labor, and sovereignty; along which, too, evangelists fought for soulsand civilization. Later, at the turn of the 20th century, during the SouthAfrican War, it became an imperial battleground on which heroes andvillains of all races vied for national gains and personal glory. More recently,it has been branded as a commodity, a heritage site on the newly-wroughttourist map of the postcolony. And for all this time it has lain at the cross-roads of an intricate web of exchange relations: relations among the variousTswana polities of the region, relations between them and diverse‘strangers,’ relations that fan out, today, across the globe. The embarrass-ment of historical traces we found here stubbornly resist the foreshortenedlens of the ethnographic here-and-now.

Consequently, in order to account for the social archaeology of the place,and for the ebullient memories of its people, we were forced from the firstto historicize our methods; this, in the early 1970s, at a time when therewas a great deal of antipathy within anthropology toward history. We hadno alternative but to develop an ethnography of the archives to discern theprocesses by which the past and the present had constructed each other; anethnography that, among other things, entailed scouring the records –images, inventories, accounts, material shards, documents, linguisticresidues, even silences and absences – for the constellation of ordinary

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practices, the passions and interests, that produced and reproduced this siteas an empirical fact, a named-and-known locale (Comaroff and Comaroff,1992). Often this meant trawling texts for what they were not, putting intoconversation pieces of paper that, in the cold storage of the archives,languish as solitary objects. It also necessitated our transposing inert verbsand nouns into depictions of living things, of vibrant ritual activities, ofexpressions of collective affect, effort, effect.

If the ethnography of the archives proved anything, it was that Mafikeng,‘Place of Stones,’ had, from the start, been situated between a rock and ahard place. The town was established by the ruling Tshidi chief, in the1850s, with two ends in mind: to ward off the seizure of his land by whitesettlers and to quarantine the rise of Christianity, along with its Eurocen-tric forms of civility. In time, and for complicated historical reasons,Mafikeng would become the capital of the chiefdom. It was here that Tshidiasserted their autonomy as fully as they could from the colonial state, thesettler economy, and the British missions; here that they fashioned an ethni-cally-marked localism – referred to, explicitly, as setswana, ‘Tswana waysand means’ – that quietly fused into itself the cultural practices of variousothers. For their part, the Protestant converts, original residents of the place,were also to make common cause with a national black petite bourgeoisieanxious to proclaim its modernity.

We hardly need insist here that, to be read ethnographically, theseeconomies of signs and practices have to be situated in the intimacy of thelocal contexts that gave them life. At the same time, they require to beinserted into the translocal processes of which they were part ab initio:processes – commodification, colonization, proletarianization, and the like– composed of a plethora of acts, facts, and utterances whose very descrip-tion demands that we frame them in the terms of one or other Theory ofHistory. The emerging substance of Tshidi religious, legal, literary culture,their styles of costume and senses of self, all deployed images and materi-als at once fresh and familiar, autochthonous and imported. Each, in its ownidiom, replayed, and sought to redress, the imagined, imaginative anti-monies of the colonial world: in marking the contrast between magic andfaith, custom and reason, folk dress and fashion, the living forms ofsetswana recycled, remade, and unravelled the contrast between theculturally particular and the universal, between ethnic subjects and modernpersons. Between Africa and Europe.16

For much of its modern existence, anthropology has been trapped insidethis set of antinomies. Its ethnographic habitat has, conventionally if notalways, been the first term of each: the particular, ethnic subjects, Africa.Conventionally, too, these terms have been taken to signify analytic domainsthat may be treated as self-sufficient unto themselves. And, for heuristicpurposes at least, as hermetically, hermeneutically closed. This was certainly





the orientation that framed our first fieldwork among ‘the Tshidi-Rolong’of Mafikeng in the late 1960s, when the proclivities of a British structural-functionalist training seemed perfectly reflected in the ethnology of Africantribes invoked by high apartheid. Yet our fieldsite – chosen because it gaveus an alternative vantage across the Bostwana border if we were expelledby a regime hostile to research on the ‘wrong’ side of the color bar – provedstubbornly intractable to this perspective. Whether in respect of political,legal, or religious processes, of kinship relations or healing rites, theresimply were no ‘customary’ practices that did not bear the imprint of long-standing engagement with various elsewheres, with (often coercive)embodied social and material forces beyond themselves. The production ofthe local here was always also entailed in the effort to fabricate somemeasure of existential coherence and closure against the cross-currents ofhistory, a history of overrule and economic expropriation, of colonial evan-gelism, of apartheid, of the ravages of deliberately exploitative labormarkets. Of prophets and profiteers, madmen and migrants.

For all their discordant hyper-modernity, then, the built-forms of thebantustan were but an increment in a drawn-out dialogue between the localand the translocal, here and elsewhere – these tropes being understood notas antonyms but as imaginative axes on maps of shifting scale. As it turnedout, for all its concrete confidence, this edifice of apartheid was in its deaththroes. The long colonial history that had spawned it was coming to anabrupt end, swept away by the changes that marked the close of the ColdWar and the realignment of the old international order. So, too, was thenational economy that underpinned the ancien régime, its industrial infra-structure and its sovereign autonomy recalibrated by the cumulative effectsof neoliberal capitalism. By the time we next visited Mafikeng, two yearsafter South Africa’s first free democratic elections, its civic structures hadbeen inhabited by functionaries of a new provincial government. The oldwhite town, once set off from its black counterpart by the railway line andby equally caste-iron cultural and legal barriers, had been significantly inte-grated.

Other auguries also suggested that Mafikeng had entered a new era – or,rather, that the proportionate relationship between rupture and continuityhad, for the moment, tilted somewhat toward the former; history, in ourview, is never all one or the other, always a complex analytic equation-to-be-resolved. Unfamiliar forces, emanating less from the old internationalorder than from the global economy, were making themselves felt as neverbefore. Some of them promised the infusion of cargo that black SouthAfricans had expected with their liberation: an army of NGOs, of ‘universal’Neoprotestant churches, of distance-learning corporations, of Internetservices had opened up around town. Almost immediately, locals triedto capture the bounty promised by these technicians of 21st century

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‘development.’ Not only did satellite dishes mushroom across the veld. Onemud-brick building, nestling beneath a thorn tree on an otherwise barrenstretch of land, sported a rough, hand-painted sign: ‘We teach in English,in step with the global age.’

At the same time, less sanguine signs gave Tswana cause for anxiety.Many pointed out – to us, in letters to newspapers, on local TV – that theold migrant labor system had collapsed and that this collapse, along with asevere recession, had made jobs extremely scarce, especially for young blackmales. An unusual number of people appeared to be dying in accidents, tobe committing suicide, to be victimized by brutal crime, to be ill, to bedepressed. Public facilities and welfare services were receding by the month.There was a growing population of ‘black people’ on the streets, immigrantsfrom elsewhere in Africa who were drawing much suspicious and scandal-ized talk: having eluded state regulation, it was said, they were plying theirwares noisily on once pristine sidewalks, thus usurping the trade of SouthAfrican merchants. Not only that: they had brought drugs and AIDS withthem, and had taken the few available jobs on the surrounding farms. Andyet, despite all this pessimism, notwithstanding all this apocalyptic talk, inthe midst of this economy of genuine hardship, some locals seemed, myste-riously, to be prospering. As we note elsewhere (Comaroff and Comaroff,1999a), it is this that has fed the raw underside of the occult economy: thekilling of alleged witches and zombie-conjurers.

Zombie-conjurers. This brings us back full circle to where we began. Tothe strangely dissociated man in the police station, to the youths who killedbecause they believed their fathers to have been turned into phantomlaborers, to popular representations of the violent abstraction entailed inwitchcraft. Recall what we said at the outset: that the zombie is a figuremetonymic of the playing out of world-historical forces in the northerlyreaches of South Africa right now; also of the domestication of a form ofneoliberal capitalism thought to enable the production of wealth withoutwork. Recall, too, the question that followed: how are we to make sensemethodologically of this figure, of those forces, of their determinations, ofthe unfolding connections between them? That the question demands asociological imagination at once local and translocal, empirical andanalytic, was brought into sharp relief for us in a context part pedagogic,part ethnographic. During a history class at the University of the NorthWest, a graduate student broke suddenly across the discussion: ‘Do Ameri-cans believe in diphoko, in magical medicines?’ he asked. ‘Is it like here? Isthere also trouble with zombies in America?’

By what methodological means, then, did we actually address thequestion of the living-dead in the late Tswana world?





Discursive flows and the dialectics of discovery

[Writing a novel is] like playing chess in three dimensions. (David Lodge,1999: 52)

So, too, is doing ethnography. Four dimensions, actually, if one includes theterrain of the virtual: the electronic commons, that is, that has interpellateditself – as a medium of translocal communication, as a vehicle for the flowof money and other kinds of capital, as a mechanism of the market, as aninstrument for the establishment of public spheres of different scales – intoeven quite remote social worlds.

Unlike chess, however, ethnography-as-practice has, in the first instance,to construct its own field of play, its own heuristic landscape. Strategically,it has always seemed logical to us to locate the center of that field aroundone or more focal points to which the anthropological senses are drawnbecause they are the crucibles in which contemporary vernacular concerns– whatever they may be, whatever their phenomenal scale – are construed,enacted, played out, socially contextualized. Given that our anthropologyseeks to be empirically-grounded without being empiricist, our objects ofresearch have invariably been defined with reference to the prevailing preoc-cupations of the times and places in which we have worked, whether theybe the politics of chiefship or ecstatic religious movements, agrariandevelopment and its undersides, the colonial encounter, occult economies,or, most recently, crime, policing, and the metaphysics of disorder. In thedialectic of the concept and the concrete, it is the latter that sets methodol-ogy in motion, serving as the fons et origo of the operations by which weset out to apprehend the existential processes of everyday life. Our ethnog-raphy, in other words, takes off not from theory or from a meta-narrative,but from the situated effects of seeing and listening. Of course, the way inwhich we see, what we pay attention to, and how, is not empiricallyordained; that, ineluctably, depends on a prior conceptual scaffolding,which, once the dialectic of discovery is set in motion, is open to recon-struction.

In the late 1990s, the zombie, and the enchanted economy of which itwas part, provided just such a focal point at which the preoccupations ofthe period had taken tangible shape. How did we know this? It came at us,insistently, from a number of diverse sources, some of them already alludedto: in such episodes as the encounter with the almost-naked man on StationRoad, in what followed at the police station, and in the sheer ordinarinessof the whole thing to the men in blue; in the murder of alleged corpse-conjurer, Motlhabane Makolomakwa, in its avidly-consumed presscoverage (see Figure 1), in its courtroom arguments, and in the conversa-tions to which it gave rise, many of them about the ‘epidemic’ of occult

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violence afflicting the northerly provinces; in ‘mob’ attacks, committed bylocal youths in the name of their communities, against those suspected ofpracticing the arcane arts; in personal stories of the sort told to us by thescion of a ruling dynasty – a man with a first-class graduate degree indevelopment studies, an excellent job in government, and a large followingas a DJ in a large city nearby – who had lost a beloved sibling, snatchedaway secretly by a witch for whom he worked until rescued many monthslater; in a remarkable incident in which police tried to save a young boyfrom the persistent attacks of a vicious tokoloshe, a translocal witchfamiliar,17 first by calling in the local television channel in the hope that itscameras might immobilize the creature and then by eliciting the help ofseveral technicians of the sacred (see Figure 2); in the reactions of the stateto outbreaks of witchcraft killings, which included tough law enforcement,high-level conferences on the topic, and the appointment of a commissionof enquiry; in discussions on the Internet, in national and regional TVdramas, documentaries, news broadcasts, and talk shows, in local genres ofcultural production (see Figure 3); and, most of all, in our everydayexchanges in homes and schools, stores and shebeens, taxi ranks andchurches across the length and breadth of the Mafikeng district.

This was not all, not by any means. But it gives a sense of the way inwhich a flow of narratives, incidents, activities, dramas, material exchanges,conversations, and representations embedded in the ‘natural’ discourse ofdifferent and complementary public spheres may come to organize theethnographic gaze – and, thereby, to set method in motion. Discursive flows,although having focal centers, are inherently open, flexible in scope, andshifting in both their content and their constituents. Determining what,exactly, falls within the purview of any such flow is itself a product in part


Figure 1




of paying careful attention, in part of inspired guesswork, in part of theor-etical and philosophical predilection; making sense of its substance dependson what, previously, we have spoken of as an ‘imaginative sociology.’ Weuse ‘imaginative’ here in two senses. It refers to: (i) doing ethnography byplumbing – through whatever resources of the analytic imagination areavailable to us within the political and ethical imperatives of our practice –the phenomenal worlds in which we situate ourselves; this by (ii) seeking tograsp the manner in which those worlds are indigenously imagined andinhabited by people variously positioned within them. Note all the plurals.They point to an anthropological cliché, albeit an important one: that mostof the signs and practices with which we concern ourselves are eithercontested or, if not, are the object of a polyphony of perceptions, valuations,means and ends.

To the extent that doing ethnography necessitates, in the first instance,tapping into focal discursive flows – and, lest we be misunderstood, we reit-erate that this includes not ‘just’ talk or texts but practices as well, not ‘just’the meaningful but also the material – it demands three critical methodo-logical operations. Each is a condition of the others’ productivity.

The first is the pursuit, in respect of any given discursive flow, of pointsof articulation among the various spheres in which it manifests itself; thisby tracing the co-presence of persons, texts, images, or arguments (andespecially arguments of images) across them. Thus, for example, the

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Figure 2




imaginative sociology that we were able to construct surrounding the figureof the zombie – and that was to sediment into our ethnographically-rootedabstraction, the ‘occult economy’ – took shape when we began to hearsimilar words and see similar pictures over and over: when, among many


Figure 3




other things, the accused youths in the Makolomakwa murder trial claimedthat the deceased had ‘killed their fathers and put them to work’; whenstories about zombification kept returning to the ‘fact’ that the witches inquestion, invariably sexual ‘perverts,’ had ‘turned people into tools,’ therebypreventing ordinary citizens from earning a living or starting a family; whenan old woman, said to have amassed ‘mysterious’ wealth, was told, as shewas set on fire by the ‘boys’ of her village, that they had no income becauseof her; when so much local opinion, from the most intellectual to the mosthumble, blamed the living-dead for the absence of employment, for denyingyoung black males the opportunity to graduate to adulthood, for the despo-liation of community. This is not to say that all representations of, or expla-nations for, the postcolonial (re-)appearance of zombies are the same. Northat they are ascribed the same social salience by everyone. However, wherethere is argument about the matter – be it in courts of law or over quartsof beer, on soccer fields or in the maize fields, around backyard fires oramong fired workers, in university classrooms, church meetings, or the elec-tronic media – it usually turns back to the connection of witchcraft to thedearth of work and the impossibility of securing the future; the last beingwhat we, in theory-speak, might refer to as a crisis of social reproduction.This, in short, is the animating vernacular around which the discursive flowis organized. It turns out to be crucial in the dialectic of the concept and theconcrete, of theory and ethnography.

The first methodological operation, then, is to map the substance of thephenomenal landscape on which any discursive flow is grounded, thus toidentify its animating vernaculars and to chart the object world in which itinterpolates itself. The second is to follow the traces of that discursive flow,of its various signs and images, tracking the migration of the latter fromtheir densest intersections to wherever else they may lead.

Let us give a couple of instances from the situation with which we wereconcerned here. One is the allusion to the sexual perversion of witches, asubmerged theme in many zombie narratives. At face value, this allusionseems, in itself, to have little to do with the workings of the occult economyor the figure of the zombie, more with the figuration of the witch as ‘stan-dardized nightmare’ (Wilson, 1951), the epitome of anti-sociality andimmorality. But in pursuing the allusion, in posing questions about it, inseeing where else it turned up, we found ourselves drawn into a meaning-maze that took in AIDS, the sexualization of death, bad blood, compro-mised masculinity, and drought – and culminated, by fusing all of thesethings, in the clear and present threat to the future of communities every-where attendant on the fact that young men cannot find work or makefamilies. As sexual pervert, the witch, in short, embodies social destruction,fertility abused, social reproduction violated.

The other instance also arose out of a recurrent theme in zombie

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narratives: what precisely is the reach of the occult economy? What is thereach of the modern witch? Is corpse-conjuring, or the arcane fabricationof wealth without work, purely a parochial matter? Or does it somehowextend beyond? One night, the local TV channel held a phone-in talk showin which the special guests were a pair of young ‘reformed’ satanists, eachwith his spiritual advisor. Asked about the difference between witchcraftand satanism, one answered, in a fluent mix of Setswana and English:‘Satanism is high-octane witchcraft. It is more international’ (Comaroff andComaroff, 1999a). This comment called forth a flood of responses from thevirtual community constructed by the program. The station switchboardwas overrun. Audiences across the province were fascinated. Satanists weresaid, by and large, to be youthful, male, and black, just the social categorymost under threat of joblessness, most likely to dabble in nefarious newtechnologies. Witches, by contrast, were held to be motivated, more often,by local conflicts, framed in long-standing idioms of kinship andcommunity; although they, too, appear to be widening their horizons andtheir range of techniques. As the ‘high octane’ petrochemical image suggests,what ‘satanic’ youth bring to the occult economy is a capacity to ‘ride thetiger’ – actually, in these parts, a leopard – ‘of time-space compression’(Harvey, 1990: 351): to move across vast distances instantly, thus toaccumulate riches, without visible effort, by means unknowable to ordinarypersons. The symbolic references in this are too dense to unravel here: theyextend from the ‘fast’ wealth being produced in the postcolony by controlover the transportation of people, signs, and things to the changing salienceof borders and transnational elsewheres in neoliberal South Africa. Aboveall, however, what became plain, listening both to the participants in theshow and to those with whom we watched it, was the fact that the occulteconomy is understood to link the most local of concerns, activities, andrelations – understood in the most local of terms – to inscrutable forcesarising out of an equally inscrutable world beyond, a world ever more‘global.’ This last, we stress again, is not our gloss. Recall that sign on themud-brick school, the one that promised an education ‘in step with theglobal age’ (p. 307).

In short, the second methodological operation involves mapping theextensions of the phenomenal landscape, the four-dimensional geography(see note 14) with reference to which any discursive flow constitutes itself.Self-evidently, this, like mapping its substance, demands more than ‘multi-sited’ ethnography. It demands an ethnography that, once orientated toparticular sites and grounded issues, is pursued on multiple dimensions andscales: an ethnography as attentive, say, to processes occurring in virtualspace as to those visible in ‘real’ places-under-production; to the trans-national mass-mediation of images as to ritual mediations between humanbeings and their ancestors; to the workings of state bureaucracies or





international courts as to the politics of ‘traditional’ chiefship and custom-ary moots; to the flow of commodities across the planet as to marriagepayments between lineages; and so on and on. Often it turns out that thereare intimate, if invisible, connections across dimensions and scales: just asplanetary commodity flows may, these days, determine bridewealth in anAfrican village, so bridewealth in an African village may have an impact onthe planetary flow of labor, cash, and goods; similarly, just as the purviewof local chiefs and their ‘traditional’ courts may be decided by global humanrights jurisprudence, global human rights jurisprudence is being challengedby demands for the recognition of ‘traditional’ cultural imperatives.

The third methodological operation is to trace the passage of a discur-sive flow over time; this to establish what, precisely, is new about it andwhat is not, what are the relative proportions of rupture and continuity towhich it speaks, what is unique and what is merely a local instance ofa wider phenomenon. How? By means of a counterpoint: by (i) eliciting alocal genealogy of cultural precursors and (ii) running it up against acomparative archaeology of similar signs and practices to ascertain whereelse, and in what circumstances, parallel discourses might be found. Inrespect of the zombies of the North West Province, and the occult economyof which they are part, local genealogies make it clear that they have notbeen around for much more than a decade; regarded thus, they signal arupture. But there did exist a foreshadowing: sefifi, observed by missionar-ies in the 19th century (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991: 143), a condition– in which ‘manhood is dead, though the body still lives’ (Brown, 1926:137) – brought about by the eclipse of a person by another, more powerfulthan s/he. This condition, it seems, provided a semantic frame within whichthe zombie has been accommodated. As to a comparative archaeology, thereis evidence of at least two broadly parallel historical situations in Africa –in Mozambique and Cameroon earlier this century – in which living-deadhave appeared (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999c). In both instances, theirpresence was intimately tied to radical changes in colonial labor conditions,to the disruption of received connections between persons, production, andplace, to the precariousness of wage employment, and to the alienationattendant on new forms of work. Put all this together and the point becomesclear: once historicized and interpellated into its local cultural context, thediscursive flow surrounding the figure of the zombie has most immediatelyto do with labor history, with a burgeoning fear of the eclipse and commod-ification of people and social relations, with a sense of lost control over themeans of producing value, with threats to the survival of local worlds underthe impact of enigmatic forces from outside, with the unmooring of horizonsand expectations occasioned by shifts in the workings of capital.

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Conclusion

This brings us back, one last time, to the dialectic of induction and deduc-tion, of theory and ethnography, of the concept and the concrete.

When we resumed our work in post-apartheid South Africa in the 1990s,as we have said, we had no idea that we would run into a fully fledged occulteconomy; or, to be more precise, into the phenomena captured in this ethno-graphically-grounded abstraction. Nor could we have known how thateconomy had become a public preoccupation. The appearance of a newbreed of witches and zombies, and the anxieties they heralded, might havebeen interpreted purely as an expression of parochial conflicts and relationsgone bad. What is more, in the hands of a cultural anthropologist with onlythe pristine horizons of the particular in view, a case could no doubt havebeen made for the idea that the living-dead of the present are a transform-ation of the sefifi of old; that the mystical evil of the here-and-now is anextension of ‘traditional’ notions of witchcraft and sorcery. However, oncewe had traced out the discursive flow in which zombification is caught up– made manifest, methodologically, by charting the landscape on which ithad taken shape, rendered decipherable by recourse to local genealogies andcomparative archaeologies, mediated by our own conceptual categories andcommitments – it became obvious that this kind of explanation would havebeen woefully incomplete. For one thing, it would have left unaccountablethe fact that similar phenomena have appeared in very different culturalcontexts at roughly the same time and in response to the same broaderhistorical conditions. For another, it would also have paid scant respect tothe real-world concerns of Tswana living in the North West: to their argu-ments about the impossibility of social reproduction, about arcane meansof producing wealth, about new forms of labor, commodification, and alien-ation, about witchcraft, satanism and globalization.

In seeking to take account of those arguments and their social moti-vation, and to grasp the phenomenology of the lived, material world out ofwhich they arose, we brought to bear an explicit theoretical orientation; itis one about which we had written a fair amount over the decade before,one which contained within it a particular understanding of the contem-porary history of capital. That orientation primed our early readings – andmisreadings – of the ‘new’ South Africa. But it did not take long for its insuf-ficiencies to make themselves plain. Apart from all else, our take on theworkings of modern industrial capitalism and its colonial extensions did notprepare us for the postcolony, for its postmodern zombies and unemploy-ment-related witch killings, for its ‘crisis’ of masculinity and generation, forthe complex absent-presence of the state. It was, in other words, the incom-pleteness of our theoretical scaffolding – incomplete, that is, in the face ofthe concrete world which we were encountering – that set the dialectic in





motion anew, altering our conceptual repertoire just as that repertoire wasbeing mobilized to make sense of the unexpected landscape on which wefound ourselves.

Ethnography is like much else in the social sciences; indeed, more so thananthropologists often acknowledge. It is a multi-dimensional exercise, a co-production of social fact and sociological imagining, a delicate engagementof the inductive with the deductive, of the real with the virtual, of thealready-known with the surprising, of verbs with nouns, processes withproducts, of the phenomenological with the political. Robert Foster (2002:247) has recently remarked, as we have ourselves (Comaroff and Comaroff,1999a), that the key problem of doing ethnography ‘is ultimately a questionof scale.’ For him, that question boils down to the avoidance of ‘dissolvinglocal particularities in the uniform sameness of global conditions withouttreating the radical distinctiveness of the local as if it stood against or apartfrom the global.’ For us, the challenge goes yet further. It is to establish ananthropology-for-the-present on an ethnographic base that dissolves the apriori breach between theory and method: an anthropology, of multipledimensions, that seeks to explain the manner in which the local and thetranslocal construct each other, producing at once difference and sameness,conjuncture and disjuncture. An anthropology that takes, as its mandate,the need to make sense of the intersecting destinies of human lives, whereverthey may happen to be lived out.

Acknowledgements

We should like to thank Loïc Wacquant for his creative, insightful editing of theoriginal text of this essay. An earlier version was presented at Ethnografeast, aconference on ‘Ethnography for the New Century: Practice, Predicament,Promise,’ sponsored by this journal and held on 12–14 September 2002 at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. Our opening ethnographic vignette is fromfieldwork conducted in 1999–2000; the study, provisionally entitled Policing thePostcolony: Crime, Cultural Justice, and the Metaphysics of Disorder in SouthAfrica, was funded by the American Bar Association.

Notes

1 In the apartheid years, Mafeking was divided: the ‘white’ town was sepa-rated by a railway line from Mafikeng, ‘The Place of Stones,’ the Tshidi-Rolong capital. When the ethnic ‘homeland’ of Bophuthatswana wascreated in the 1970s, its center, Mmabatho, was built alongsideMafikeng/Mafeking. The conurbation is referred to these days, rather

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awkwardly, as Mafikeng-Mmabatho. The old Mafeking, as exclusive whiteenclave and as a spelling for the place, has disappeared.

2 Since we first wrote about zombies in the North West Province (1999c), wehave been regaled with stories, from scholars and non-scholars alike, oftheir presence elsewhere in South Africa. Recently, for example, Ilana vanWyk (University of Pretoria) – who is conducting research in northernKwaZulu-Natal – told us that, according to local people, a large numberare crossing the border from Mozambique. These spectral figures, who aresaid ‘not to speak,’ appear strikingly similar to those that we encounteredon the other side of the country.

3 The youths were sentenced to 20 years each for the murder by the SupremeCourt of Bophuthatswana. For accounts of the case, see ‘Bizarre ZombieClaim in Court,’ Nat Molomo, The Mail, 31 March 1995, p. 2; ‘PetrolMurder Denial,’ The Mail, 2 June 1995, p. 2; ‘Five Men Jailed for 100Years,’ The Mail, 22 September 1995, p. 23. We are grateful to the primary(eye)witness in the case, Thaisi Medupe, the Registrar of the High Court inMmabatho, Reggie Mpame, the headman of Matlonyane, Abraham Maeco,and several associates of the victim for retelling the events in question.

4 This case was reported in the South African media; see e.g. ‘Spirits Strikeat Labour Relations,’ Mail & Guardian, 27 September 1995.

5 The play, by Brett Bailey, featured at the Standard Bank National ArtsFestival in July 1996; it was later televised. A TV documentary series, Issuesof Faith, also dealt with the topic on 12 July 1998 on SABC2; for one ofmany newspaper accounts, see ‘Disturbing Insight into Kokstad ZombieKillings,’ Ntokozo Gwamanda, Sowetan, 15 July 1998, p. 17.

6 Even where the trade occurs entirely within a national economy, it is oftenseen as a means by which the new rich, stereotypically portrayed as globalin their operations and orientations, extract the essence of the poor and/orthe racially marked for their own nefarious ends. This is so in South Africa,where there is an active market in body parts for medicines – and a livelylocal discourse about it. So much so, that prices for hearts, eyes, and otherorgans have been quoted in the media (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999a)and, recently, in fiction (see e.g. Williams, 2002: 46).

7 ‘I Was Turned Into a Zombie,’ Mzilikazi Wa Afrika, Sunday Times [Extra],11 July 1999, p. 1.

8 Thus, for example, a significant number of films featuring zombies weremade in the 1930s and 1940s. So were several in which zombification onthe production line was a central motif, even if the figure of the zombieitself was absent; perhaps the most celebrated was Charlie Chaplin’sModern Times (1936).

9 We address some of the theoretical and conceptual issues raised by thefigure of the zombie, and by occult economies, in a series of loosely inter-related essays (see e.g. 1999a, 1999c, 2000, 2002).





10 The Great Outdoors premiered at the Standard Bank National Arts Festivalon 30 June 2000. We thank Neil McCarthy, who made the unpublishedscript available to us.

11 This conceit was already called into question in the 1930s in, among otherthings, the works of Isaac Schapera (see Comaroff and Comaroff, 1988),in Monica (Wilson) Hunter’s Reaction to Conquest (1936), in GodfreyWilson’s Economics of Detribalization (1942), and in the writings of theManchester School in Central Africa.

12 As Sangren (2000: 244) notes, Englund and Leach claim that they are notagainst meta-narratives in general, only this meta-narrative. However, theirclaim seems empty in light of (i) their silence on their own theoreticalorientations and (ii) the promiscuity with which they represent anthropo-logical writings on modernity, many of which – including our own – treatthe term not as a theoretical construct at all but as a problem for anthro-pological theory. In this and other respects, the critiques of the essay byGupta (2000) and by Meyer (2000), under the Current Anthropologyformat, are instructive.

13 In their discussion of colonialism in Papua, for example, Englund and Leach(2000: 233) eschew accounts that dwell upon exploitation and violence;this because local narratives do not stress these things. In this, they confusenative experience and its narration, the importance of which few woulddeny, with an adequate analysis of the workings of colonial overrule.

14 The fourth dimension – the conventional three, of course, being length,breadth, and depth – is located in the virtual reaches of cyberspace, in whichthe constitutive connections between the local and the global are constantlyremapped.

15 Strictly speaking, Mangope was not yet President of Bophuthatswana. Hewas Chief Minister of the Tswana Territorial Authority (TTA), a positionto which he acceded when the TTA was created, in 1969, as the first stepin the establishment of the ‘independent’ ethno-nation. Bophuthatswanaonly came formally into being a couple of years later. In Tshidi historicalconsciousness, however, the brief existence of the TTA has been obliterated:local knowledge has it that Bophuthatswana was founded, under PresidentMangope, at the end of the 1960s.

16 Elsewhere (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997: 25) we have explained whythese antimonies tend to be reproduced over the long run, despite the factthat the sociology of the worlds to which they refer constantly vitiate easydualisms. We have also taken care to make the point that, however insis-tently they may be invoked in vernacular discourse, such oppositions cannever be deployed as viable analytic or conceptual terms.

17 The tokoloshe – a small, hairy figure with exaggerated sexual organs – haslong been associated with the Nguni-speaking peoples of the east coast ofSouth Africa; until recently, it was not part of the cultural landscape of the

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North West or the Sotho-speaking regions. But, in this age of translocality,it, like many things ‘traditional,’ has migrated and is now found acrossmuch of the subcontinent.

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■ JEAN COMAROFF, the Benard E. and Ellen C. SunnyDistinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the Universityof Chicago, has conducted fieldwork in southern Africa and GreatBritain and is interested in colonialism, modernity, ritual, power,and consciousness. Her specific foci of study have included thereligion of the Southern Tswana peoples; colonialism, Christianevangelism and liberation struggles in southern Africa; healing andbodily practice, and the making of local worlds in the wake ofglobal ‘modernity’. Her current research, jointly with JohnComaroff, concerns problems of public order, state sovereignty andpolicing in postcolonial contexts. [email: [email protected]] ■

■ JOHN COMAROFF, the Harold H. Swift Distinguished ServiceProfessor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, doesresearch in southern Africa, concentrating on the Tswana peoples.He is interested in colonialism, postcoloniality, modernity,neoliberalism, social theory, and the history of consciousness; inpolitics, law, and historical anthropology.[email: [email protected]] ■





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Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction